Migrate from WordPress.com to WordPress.org – .com

In this tutorial we see how to migrate step by step from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, the version hosted on your own hosting and domain.

Differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

I already have a whole tutorial dedicated to listing the , so I’m not going to spend too much time at this point, you can see it there.

But one of the things that interests everyone the most, and one of the things that causes many people to switch to the .org version, is that in your hosted version, you can install plugins, which you can’t in .com.

This makes the level of customization much higher, since we can even install our own , , , , etc.

Thus, it is very frequent the case of someone who starts at WordPress.com to have a free website quickly and easily, without hosting or domain, but after a while the limitations that this has, make them consider migrating to WordPress. .org.

So let’s see what we do to migrate all the content, as well as the SEO and positioning that it had accumulated.

Export All WordPress.com Content

The first thing we have to do to proceed with the migration is to export all our content. For that we go to the “Settings” tab of the side menu:

Once we are on the settings page, we go to the last option, “Export”. There we will see a very simple interface, with an “Export all” button that speaks for itself.

This exports both posts and pages, and all of our authors and dates. If we want a more granular control, we simply click on the little arrow next to the button, and we can choose:

As you can see, we can choose by content, authors, states, dates, categories, etc. This can be very useful if an author wants to become independent, or we decide to make a website for only one category of the topics we talk about in ours.

In any case, whatever we choose, once we click on the blue button, the export process begins. It will last a few seconds or minutes, depending on the amount of content we have, and then they will indicate that it has finished:

As you can see, we have not downloaded any file, but they have sent us a link to our email, similar to the one we see below:

As you can see, in this process there are still some things to translate, but it is understood quite well. The idea is that if we click on the link, we will download a .zip file with all the information that we have exported.

Be careful with this file, because it contains all our content! Let’s not go sharing it happily. The link must be used within the next seven days, then it expires.

Well, with this we have already done the first part. We have “pulled” all of our content. Now we have to see how we “put” it in WordPress.

Import all content to WordPress.org

Ok, by now you should have a .zip file on your hard drive with all of our content similar to this:

Now we must go to our WordPress. It is assumed that we have already bought a domain, we have contracted a hosting, and we have installed WordPress. If not, I recommend you take a look at , because there you can see everything. In classes and

Once we have this done, we will go to the “Tools” menu of our WordPress, and we will click on the “Import” submenu.

That will take us to a screen where we can see what type of import we want. There we must select the last one, that is to say “Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories and tags from a WordPress export file.“

As you will see, below we have the option to “Install now”. That’s because this functionality is not built in by default, but rather comes in a plugin. You give the link, and it will automatically install it and the text will change to “Run importer”.

The importer will ask us for the import file. Important: We should not upload the .zip file that we have downloaded directly, it will not give us the error “This does not appear to be a WXR file, the WXR version number is missing or invalid“. First we must unzip it. Inside we will see that there is an XML file. And yes, we will upload it:

Next we will click on “Upload file and import”, and we will see the following screen in which we must configure a couple of settings:

The first option asks us what we do with the authors of the content that we are going to import, and gives us 3 options:

import author: This will create a new author and give it ownership of the imported content.
Create a new user: This will create a user with the name that we tell him and assign the content to him.
Assign to an existing user: This will assign the content to a user that we already have on our website.

Images and attachments

What we have exported, and are now about to import, is just data, mostly HTML code. That means that in there are no images in that file.

Again: That .zip that we have now unzipped to .xml, does not contain any images of the ones we had on our old website. It only has the URLs of them.

This means that if we now import without downloading the images, even though they would be seen on our website, in reality we will not be hosting them, nor will we have them in our multimedia library. This is a danger, since the moment we close our website on WordPress.com, they will be lost.

So what we must do is select the “Download and import attachments” option, to to download the images from WordPress.com one by one, upload them to our hosting, and add them to the library. This will make the process slower, but it is the most recommended, without a doubt.

Once chosen, we will click on the “Send” button, and if we have done everything correctly, we will have our prize in the form of this message:

On certain occasions we may encounter problems. The most classic ones are from files that already existed, and that therefore we cannot upload again, duplicate posts, or even an error of exceeding the maximum execution time, or time out.

The first errors are secondary, since they are simply content that we have already imported in other cases. But the execution time can give us problems, depending on the hosting we are on.

If that were your case, it will usually indicate one of these two errors:

fatal mistake: Exceeded maximum execution time of X seconds
Timeout (error 504): The server is acting as a proxy or gateway and has not received a response from the other server in time, so it cannot respond properly to the browser’s request.

If so, you should contact your hosting provider and tell them to extend it to you. (even temporarily) those values, because you are doing a migration, that you need to expand them, and that as soon as it is, you can put them back. In principle, if they are serious (CDmon, SiteGround, Webempresa, etc.). You won’t have problems.

SEO and positioning

Finally, one last consideration regarding SEO, because we do not want to lose a bit of what we have positioned in Google, right? Well we’re not done yet

It turns out that until now you had addresses like this:

https://whatever-it-is.wordpress.com

And now you have:

In other words, if you close your blog on WordPress.com, Google will not see it, it will deindex it, and you will lose all your work. So now we have to work with the redirects.

I have an episode of the podcast in which I talk in depth in case you want to know more. But to sum it up, in this case you should go to WordPress. You have it in “Domains”, choose the domain, go to “Improve” and then “Redirect”.

Here we introduce our new domain, and that’s it. For $13 we’ve got it done for a whole year, long enough for Google to see that we’ve “moved” house and switch all the links to the new domain.

If we already had a premium domain (instead of using subdomains)this step does not need to be done, because all the URLs will be kept, and it will not be necessary to make redirections or anything similar.

Summary and conclusions

On many occasions we start working with WordPress.com, but due to its limitations and lack of flexibility we want to move to WordPress.org.

In those cases, we must first export the WordPress.com content to our computer, and then import it to our WordPress.org that we have installed on our hosting.

In this process it is important not to forget to also migrate the images and make the corresponding redirects, so as not to depend more on WordPress.com, and so that it does not affect our SEO.

And here is the tutorial! You already know that if you want to know more, you have the basic, intermediate and advanced. More than 6047 videos at your disposal, do not miss them 🙂